TourRadar, the world’s largest group tour booking site, has just announced the winners of the annual TourRadar Awards, naming the Most Amazing Tours of 2014 and the inaugural Guide of the Year Award winners. The awards are based on thousands of reviews submitted by travellers throughout 2014.

TourRadar launched it’s first awards in 2012 to highlight extraordinary trips based solely on customer feedback. All TourRadar awards are based on the quality & quantity of traveller feedback, which is then normalized to compensate for the frequency, length and size discrepancies of the tours. In 2014, TourRadar additionally introduced a new award, Guide of the Year. As guides are the backbone of every group tour, we, at TourRadar, feel it is an important addition to our awards list.

In Europe, the 'Most Amazing Tour' winner was 'European Wonder' - a 14 day coach tour for 18-39 year olds run by Topdeck, combining a roadtrip to iconic destinations with cultural experiences such as lacemaking, cheesetasting and a gourmet picnic behind the Eiffel Tower. Rather than a judging panel, the winners of all the Awards were chosen via Social Media response and rating. Posted comments for European Wonder included: 'Such a fantastic time!!!!! So much fun the greatest people, tour leader and driver t be stuck with for 2 weeks. Many shenanigans were had and spirits were high. What a time we had.'

The Most Amazing Tour Award 2014 in the ‘worldwide’ category was awarded to ThaIntro - an 8 day introductory tour to Thailand for backpackers and young travellers. ThaIntro was a consistently high performing and well reviewed tour throughout 2014; particularly among travellers between 18 - 30 years old.

The inaugural Guide of The Year Award 2014 recipient and winner of the €10,000 in prize money is Isobel Needham, a tour guide for the Busabout & Contiki brands. Isobel received hundreds of reviews that emphasised her bubbly personality, knowledge and experience in guiding a number of different tours across multiple continents.

With this new Guide award category, TourRadar is acknowledging the excellent dedication and enthusiasm that the guides give to make every traveller’s experience an incredible one. Additionally, the winning guide can nominate the charity of their choice which will receive €5,000 of the prize money, donated by TourRadar. Isobel has selected the New Zealand based charity livemoreawesome, a registered New Zealand based charity determined to find better ways to help the people of New Zealand deal with depression, a very worthwhile cause.

TourRadar will be continuing their Awards race in 2015, with travellers encouraged to leave their reviews at www.tourradar.com/review

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About the company:TourRadar is an online travel marketplace specializing in group travel. Travis and Shawn Pittman founded TourRadar in 2010 with the vision of helping travellers find & book their dream tour and to make lifelong friendships along the way. Since then, TourRadar has evolved into an industry-leading online platform that provides a seamless and effective booking process, genuine consumer tour reviews and engages travellers to meet each other before the trip departs. TourRadar now features more than 30,500+ reviews and opinions from their global travel community, covering more than 20,000 tour listings in over 14,000 cities and destinations. As the leading website for travellers to review & book their multi-day group tour experience, TourRadar received 1000’s of reviews in 2014. Find out more at tourradar.com/who-we-are.